Mechanics and Meaning in Architectures

Abstract

ing in a school of architecture for nearly twenty years. Over the course of that experience, only on the rarest of occasions has a student exhibited a genuine interest in technology. The calculations required in structures, heat transfer, and illumination are normally considered to be irrelevant in design, if not damaging to the architectural imagination. The students who do find these issues interesting are those who are skilled in mathematics. Unfortunately, there seem to be no Christopher Wrens among them. When I ask my students what I am sitting on during an informal part of a lecture, they inevitably reply in their educated intelligence that it is not the edge of a small table as it appears to be but rather an assembly of atoms and molecules that are predominately made up of empty space. When I point out to them that this is a fact that is not really in evidence to either one of us, they just shake their collective heads at my ignorance. No one answers that I am sitting on a table or even that I am sitting on an assembly of wood that we call a table. That would be to announce the obvious and the ignorance of the speaker in the process. When these same students are asked what a beam is later in their educational career there is an immediate strain to remember faint ideas of compression, tension, and bending moment. No one ever thinks of answering that the beam is the material shape that we see and touch. That again would seem to be to play the fool. Somehow we have corporately managed to reduce phenomena to terms that none of us fully comprehends. A table is a table and a beam is a beam in our commonly understood experience. What it means to be one of these things is too often bypassed in a common rush to the intelligence of abstraction. We no longer begin our deliberations concerning technology from a world of things that we know, but rather from a world of abstractions that constitute the way we think that we ought to consider these issues. As I have watched this process throughout my years as a teacher, I have become aware that there is more to this split than meets the eye. Architects, beneath their special knowledge and skill, are apt representatives of the population at large. They too live in, feel, and think about the accommodations that have been built for them, as do all other people. Architects are just as m